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Monday, October 15, 2012

Fink Ployd

Do you remember the good old times when the market was teeming with counterfeit products that looked the same and sometimes also functioned the same as the original ones? When you could get some "original" Abibas trainers or a Panasoanic cassette player (yes, it was a time when the music came on cassettes that could be rewound with a pencil, but that's another story). I personally remember having got a coffee grinder, Mounilex, and not being able to tell the fake, not even when reading the name. For weeks I kept reading Moulinex on it. And it was so easy to have it wrong: the same kind-of-hand-written font, the original brand in my head and, not least, the quality of the ground coffee. Truth be told, I wasn't any less happy when I found out the counterfeit, for two big and fat reasons: first, it ground the coffee properly without problems and second, I didn't know any better, I'd never had a genuine Moulinex grinder to compare mine against. Happiness unaltered.

...Which was exactly the same feeling I had when I went to a concert last week to see a band performing not only Pink Floyd music, but also their style. Still, I wouldn't go that far to say, like some picturesque Kusturica's heroes, that "our whisky is better than the original one", but they were doing just fine. Some fine ears would probably spot loads of flaws, but I have the music finesse of a donkey, thus all bliss on my front.
I liked the idea of the concert, "Through the years". Never thought it would be so interesting to hear the evolution of a band, to see the fingerprints of a certain era, to actually see the youth and the mature in one night.

Great intro... And by intro I mean the first part of the concert, the sixties that is. Aside from the fact that I didn't understand anything, and I do mean it!, I relaxed myself after a busy day. Eyes closed, trying to let the music into me. Zero success with the music. I was wondering, though. What and how much did they smoke back then, to produce that psychedelic stream of tunes? And why do I keep thinking smoking was not enough?

On the big screen in front of us - short movies/clips with the band - the original one - and the song's theme. Beautiful compilation, touching pieces of history. Wish I had known the people in the films. Luckily I had my wife next to me, who knows any single band and individual and their music since the dawn of art till the present day. She even hums sometimes movie tunes, as she recognises them, whereas I am convinced that they never existed outside that film. So, I would give her a nudge now and again and ask for explanation. I remember a difficult one:

me(whispering): "Who's the thin young guy with long hair in that black and white picture?"
her: "That's Gilmour"
me again, not buying it: "That can't be true, I know him. He's old and fatter than me, short hair, always wearing a cardigan jumper and when on stage he has Andy Roddick's t-shirt on, 4 sizes larger".
she: "shhhhh!"

Well, after an hour of intro, in came the music that I understood. Music with words! I don't know about you, but for me the music should have lyrics, so I can understand the message. I can't figure it out through the panoply of notes and octaves, I need to be told precisely. They took us to the dark side of the moon, up on the wall and then to the saving bell of division. And beyond, on a remote island of Gilmour. No final cut in the end, maybe to send us a subliminal message that the story never ends.

And, as the art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortably numb ones, I felt just right: disturbed, disturbed, disturbed, comforted, disturbed, disturbed .... Of course, the comfort that I felt happened on the break and it was directly coupled to the free beverage we had it included in the ticket, but still it felt like a touch of art.

But, no matter how disturbed I was, there's notthing compared to how those guys were back then(again, the original ones). They were on the brink of just losing it completly, mark my words. I realised it at the very moment when they told us about their quandary: "...Mother should I run for president?"
Dude, come on, you're English, you don't run for president, you should run for queen.

Anyway, jokes aside, I wish you were all there, to enjoy a bit of escape from time. And you wouldn't have to trade your heroes for ghosts.